Kelly McParland: A scandalous absence of scandal in robocalls scandal

A scandalous absence of scandal in robocalls scandal

I have a confession to make. I have not been following the robocalls “scandal” with all the fervency it calls for.

It’s possible my inability to get excited results from six years … oops, make it seven .. of the Liberals leaping to their feet every 18 seconds to accuse the Conservatives of plotting to pervert Canadian values, undermine democracy and display their contempt for the laws of the country. There’s this old morality tale about a kid who cried “wolf” too many times, so when a real wolf showed up, no one believed it any more. Maybe that’s why I have a hard time believing this is the real wolf.

It could also be that I find the premise hard to accept. To wit: a top-level conspiracy of Conservative grandees to steal the election by disrupting the vote, sending voters to incorrect polls or discouraging them from turning up at all. This would indeed be a major scandal if it was true, but think about it: Would a nation-wide exercise in disruptive phone calls have any chance of going undetected? Does anyone really believe (outside the fetid confines of the Toronto Star) that the senior ranks of any sane government would take such an extreme risk going into an election it expected to win anyway?

I could see some local bozos getting it into their heads that robocalling the opposing candidate’s supporters might be a great idea, but your cynicism has to be a lot deeper than mine (which would take some doing) to believe anyone could get to be Prime Minister, or his national campaign chairman, and still be either dumb enough, irresponsible enough or reckless enough to sign on to such a plan. And since both Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his top campaign official, Guy Giorno, have categorically denied any knowledge or involvement, neither would appear to fit any of those three categories. The determination of some camps to keep pretending the whole thing was a plot anyway rests on the argument that, yeah, well, they’re probably lying… and besides, the Tories have so many other tricks that robocalls fits their modus operandi.

In fact, given all the craters that have opened under the conspiracy theory, about the only way you can go on believing it is via an a dislike of the Tories so intense it overwhelms all other critical faculties. Kind of like this. The notion that only Conservatives engage in this sort of chicanery was shot down when one of Bob Rae’s finest toddled off to help himself to Vic Toews’s divorce papers, then surreptitiously released them to the press. And confirmed when Frank Valeriote, the Guelph MP whose riding is ground zero in the whole affair, admitted he too engaged in surreptitious robocalling, with a smear job on abortion as his topic of choice.

The intimation that a cowed government was doing everything in its power to prevent further details of the matter becoming known ran into some heavy weather when the Conservatives voted en masse to hand greater powers to Elections Canada. The vote — which passed unanimously, 283-0 — would require parties to hand over more financial information on their activities, and make phone companies register with the elections organization if they work for any of the parties during an election. Similarly, Elections Canada itself put a gaping hole in the notion that Canadians were so upset by election-eve shenanigans that they lunged for their phones to share their outrage.

Turns out most of the 31,000 messages it received — the figure that turned the whole affair from a local curiosity into a national scandal — were actually form letters sent via automated online systems set up for that purpose, and didn’t actually spell out any specific complains about robocalls. Most came after MPs started encouraging supporters to feed the rhetoric on Parliament Hill by contacting Elections Canada if they could suddenly remember a complaint, and there’s no telling what proportion of the number came from opposition-affiliated organizations or support groups.

“I can tell you that at this point we know that the majority of the contacts, because we’re still calling them contacts, have been made via automated forms or online form letters. These would include political action groups like Leadnow.ca, [political] parties were doing it, as were media outlets,” Elections Canada communications director John Enright told The Hill Times Monday.

So, no conspiracy, no cover-up, no real outpouring of national rage. No untainted evidence that telephone hijinks were anything but a local oddity, and in a riding where the Liberals were using the same weapons. No sign that voting patterns were seriously affected, no evidence that turnout was suppressed. As scandals go, the absence of scandal is virtually scandalous.